A comparative study of word embedding techniques for SMS spam detection

E-mail and SMS are the most popular communication tools used by businesses, organizations and educational institutions. Every day, people receive hundreds of messages which could be either spam or ham. Spam is any form of unsolicited, unwanted digital communication, usually sent out in bulk. Spam emails and SMS waste resources by unnecessarily flooding network lines and consuming storage space. Therefore, it is important to develop high accuracy spam detection models to effectively block spam messages, so as to optimize resources and protect users. Various word-embedding techniques such as Bag of Words (BOW), N-grams, TF-IDF, Word2Vec and Doc2Vec have been widely applied to NLP problems, however a comparative study of these techniques for SMS spam detection is currently lacking. Hence, in this paper, we provide a comparative analysis of these popular word embedding techniques for SMS spam detection by evaluating their performance on a publicly available ham and spam dataset. We investigate the performance of the word embedding techniques using 5 different machine learning classifiers i.e. Multinomial Naive Bayes (MNB), KNN, SVM, Random Forest and Extra Trees. Based on the dataset employed in the study, N-gram, BOW and TF-IDF with oversampling recorded the highest F1 scores of 0.99 for ham and 0.94 for spam.